Electronic control units on board motor vehicles increasingly comprise semiconductor components such as microcontrollers, signal-processing components or even power switches. The amount of heat generated by semiconductor devices is constantly increasing. It is generally known to provide heat sinks having cooling pillars that are used to transfer heat from an electronic component to the surrounding air. In the technical literature, the cooling pillars of the heat sinks are also called ‘needles’ or else ‘pin-fins’. More commonly, the term used to denote a heat sink with cooling pillars is ‘pin-fin heat sink’. Pin-fin heat sinks are also able to be applied to multi-component devices such as power supplies or else electronic control units.
In order to boost the heat dissipation capability of the heat sinks, it is known to use the convection heat transfer mechanism, either through natural convection or through forced convection by way of a blower.
However, this type of solution is not completely satisfactory for several reasons. A heat sink is generally not able to be scalable, that is to say that its size limits heat dissipation to a set maximum value since its dissipation surface area is fixed. Natural convection additionally does not generally make it possible to uniformly cool all of the pin-fins of the heat sink. Forced convection generally requires a complex implementation of a bulky blower above all of the pin-fins of the heat sink.
As a result, one objective of the present invention is to provide a pin-fin heat sink having an improved heat dissipation capability that overcomes the problems mentioned above. Other aims and advantages of the present invention will emerge in the light of the following description.